


He'll Be Here

by GreenLies



Category: Banana Fish (Anime & Manga)
Genre: Bittersweet, Fluff and Angst, M/M, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-27
Updated: 2020-03-27
Packaged: 2021-03-01 05:13:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,686
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23345986
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GreenLies/pseuds/GreenLies
Summary: Eiji ran a hand through his hair. "You guys don’t know him like I do. The only way he wouldn’t come would be if the earth stopped turning. And maybe not even then.”
Relationships: Ash Lynx/Okumura Eiji
Comments: 5
Kudos: 92





	He'll Be Here

**Author's Note:**

> a/n 09/08/2020: so i've recently come to discover that Ibe is not actually eiji's coach. however, he is now, because i'm the author and i said so. thank you to everyone still reading this fic. have a smashing day.

_Deep breath. In. Out. In. Out. Go.  
One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine.  
Push.  
Lift.  
Let go. _

He flew over the crossbar, landing on his back. Faint applause echoed around the stands. Everything sounded muffled except his heart, beating in his ears, impossibly loud.  
He rolled off the mat, shook hands with the boy who hadn’t cleared the previous jump, and walked back over to his coach. 

“Good job.” Ibe made a mark on the clipboard and clapped Eiji on the shoulder. “You can go home now, if you want. I know you don’t have any more events.”  
Eiji smiled at him, tight, grateful. “Thank you.” 

He slipped a hoodie on over his track uniform as he made his way behind the field to the parking lot. Despite the roaring in his ears, his mind felt strangely clear, as it always did after a meet. Maybe it was the adrenaline, the freedom, the way he could fly again despite everyone watching. This was his favorite part of his events - when he felt no sadness, no pain, no emptiness, when his heart filled with success and gratitude, and everything was, for a moment, okay. 

“Does it ever stop hurting?” He had once asked Ash as they sat on the couch, sipping tea, Ash’s eyes half-closed. He wasn’t sure if the boy had even heard until he responded. 

“Does what ever stop hurting?”

“When they die.” It had been a couple of months after Shorter’s death, and the pain still would hit Eiji right when he didn’t expect it, knocking him off his feet, leaving him breathless. “Does the pain ever go away?” 

Ash opened his eyes and sighed, putting his mug on the floor. “No, it doesn’t stop hurting. And you never stop thinking about them.” He smiled so sadly, so wistfully, that it almost broke Eiji’s heart. “But you learn to manage it.” 

Eiji hugged him slowly, gently, as if he were made of glass. “I’m sorry.”

And Ash had leaned into him, closing his eyes again. “You have no reason to be sorry.”

_I get it now, Ash_ , Eiji thought as he sat in his car, waiting for it to warm up. Ash still occupied his thoughts, but after seven months, the pain had dulled. He remembered the boy in fondness, rather than loathing or desperation or any of the stages he had gone through after hearing about his death. In dark times, he took solace in the fact that no matter how bad it felt, it would never be _that_ bad again. 

_That bad_ meaning after he had found out the truth. After he returned to Japan, and Ibe got a call. They took a plane back to New York the next day, before Eiji’s wounds had even healed, and when they got there it was confirmed. Ash was dead. 

Eiji was consumed by grief after that. When he returned to Japan, all hope had left him. He stopped eating, stopped smiling, and would pace around his room for hours and then lay in bed for days. His friends and family would come by, coaxing food and drink into him and trying to comfort him. Their words sounded like static. Nothing could be said, nothing could be done, that would bring Ash back, that would let him keep his promise to stay by Eiji’s side. And so days turned into weeks, and after three months, the pain was still there, forcing him to feel, forcing him to remember. And a part of Eiji, deep down, was worried that it was going to be forever. Worried that he would never be happy again.  
Ibe visited one day, and Eiji looked at him blankly, watching his mouth shape into words he couldn’t hear, and it was just another hour in the day until a tear dripped down his coach’s face. 

Ibe had never cried in front of Eiji. Not when he had been shot at, not when he saw Shorter die, not even during Ash’s funeral. But there he was, eyes leaking, face wet as he begged Eiji to sit up, to eat, to do _anything_. 

“I can’t make you better, Eiji.” he had stated. “It has to be you. But please, please, help yourself. If not for your sake, then for mine.”

Seeing the man he had looked up to for so long break down pricked Eiji’s heart, causing a feeling of something besides the sadness that had overwhelmed him for so long.  
And so, with Ibe’s encouragement, he finally went outside. 

At first, they only walked around the block. Ibe didn’t say anything to him, and the silence was nice. The sunshine was nice - Eiji had forgotten how good it felt against his skin. When one of the neighbor’s dogs ran up to him and sniffed around his legs, he finally smiled, and that was nice, too. 

After he got back home and bid Ibe goodbye, Eiji opened the windows. He made tea; lemon and rosemary, just like Ash used to drink. He got back into bed, but something had changed. The combination of the rays hitting his face and the hot tea thawed his frozen soul, just a little. 

His walk with Ibe had been the beginning of a very long, very painful road to recovery. Some days he would walk outside for miles and miles, and some he didn’t have the strength to get out of bed. He talked to his mother and father when they came to see him. He called his younger sister and assured her that he was alright. He swept the floor of his small apartment. He started cooking for himself. He cut his hair that had grown past his shoulders in the past few months. He bought a plant - a small sprig of jasmine that forced him out of bed every day to water it. Slowly, he could feel the darkness that had consumed him for so long lifting. 

One day, Ibe took him for a drive. It was to nowhere specific, he assured Eiji, and the younger boy went along with it until he saw that they were at his old high school. 

“Ibe, what are you doing?” He had asked. 

Ibe led him to the track behind the school and went into the supply closet, returning with the pole Eiji had used when he was still able. _Thirteen feet, slight bend, gentle grip_ , his brain reminded him unhelpfully. 

“I can’t.” Eiji’s eyes filled with tears, panic gripping his chest as he looked at the crossbar, higher than a mountain. “I can’t do it.” 

“Eiji, no, Eiji.” Ibe struggled for a moment before taking the crossbar down. “Look, you won’t even have to clear anything. I promise.” 

The younger boy swiped a hand across his eyes. “I don’t know.” 

“Please. Just once, and then you never have to do it again if you don’t want to.”

Eiji shook out his legs, walking up to the white mark on the track leading up to the mats. He gripped the pole halfway down and took a deep breath. 

_In. out. In. out. Go._

_One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine._

His performance was barely four feet, his arms shaking under the duress of lifting his body weight over the pole - pathetic. He had gotten so weak. But for a moment, he was flying, and his heart filled with the exhilaration of freedom. 

He wanted to do it again. 

At first, it had been difficult. He had lost weight, of course, but he had also lost almost all of his muscle, making the sport exponentially harder. But Ibe helped him, and he helped himself, and soon the mountain that was the crossbar seemed smaller and smaller. He had begun to enter competitions - first local, then by city and region. They gave him something to look forward to, a reason to keep going. After a while, the pain was no longer raw, and Eiji was the most content he had been since he had gone to America. 

His phone pinged. A text from Ibe.  
**Good work today. See you at 5:00 tomorrow for training.**  
The car was warm enough now. Eiji stepped on the gas and turned up the radio as he navigated his way home. 

Eiji enjoyed pole vaulting, but he hated running. He resented his thirty-minute warm-up jog around the track and vowed to do it as slowly as possible. 

“Speed it up, Eiji!” Yelled Ibe from the opposite side of the track. “One more lap!” 

Eiji looped around the track again before stopping by the mats, hands on his knees, out of breath. “Okay.” He grabbed his pole. “Let’s go.” 

Six feet, ten feet, thirteen feet. 

“Do you know the height you did yesterday?” Ibe asked. 

“Fifteen feet, seven inches?”

“Right! Do you want to try that again?” 

Eiji nodded his assent and stretched out his arms as Ibe raised the crossbar. It seemed so easy now - hard to believe he had ever found it challenging at all.  
He didn’t know what happened. Perhaps his foot slipped, or his hands were too close together on the pole. Maybe he had gotten too confident after winning yesterday or it was simply higher than expected. Either way, the moment his feet left the ground, he could tell something was wrong. 

Panic filled his brain. Ibe was yelling, but he couldn’t make out the words. _Lean right_ , he thought. _No, left. Is it left? Land on the mat._  
He balanced, for a split second, completely upside down. 

The pole slipped. 

A scream forced its way out of Eiji’s mouth as he fell down, down, down, and he knew before he got there that he wouldn’t make it onto the mat.  
He heard the sickening crack as he landed on the track, but his vision was already too far gone. 

There was a burst of pain in his head, white-hot. 

And then there was nothing at all. 

The first thing Eiji registered was the beeping. Small, rhythmic noises coming from every side of the room. The second thing he registered, a split second later, was the pain. It started on his head and ran in cold trails throughout his body. His spine. His arms. His legs. He was on fire. 

He opened his eyes. 

In front of him sat his mother and father, huddled together over a magazine. Eiji let out a small, dry cough. 

“Eiji!” His mother shrieked, the magazine falling out of her hands. She and his father ran to the side of his bed. “How are you feeling?”

“Ow.” Eiji’s voice was rough, but he was proud that he could speak at all. “What happened?”

“You don’t-” His mother cut herself off quickly and looked at his father in panic. “Get the doctor.” 

He obliged, and she stroked her son’s hand, muttering reassurance to him. Eiji didn’t think he needed reassurance; the pain was ebbing by the minute, probably because of one of the many IVs attached to his arm. He just wanted to know why he was at the hospital in the first place. 

His father walked in briskly, doctor in tow. They sat in front of Eiji. 

“Eiji, I’m Dr. Jones. I’m going to be taking care of you for the next few days.” He held out a hand that Eiji shook gingerly with an arm that felt too heavy to be his own. “I need you to answer this question honestly: What is the last event that you fully remember happening?” 

“I…” Eiji racked his brain, confusion setting in when he realized all his memories seemed to be coated in plastic he couldn’t tear away. They were fuzzy, and the more he tried to reach them, the more they seemed to elude him. “I was on a plane home from America. And then… a pole vaulting competition?” He wasn’t sure if that had been a dream or not - he wasn’t sure what was real anymore. Panic gripped him. “What happened?” 

“Eiji, I’m going to be honest with you.” The doctor leaned forward in his chair and sighed. “You were in a very serious pole-vaulting accident. You’re lucky to be alive.” 

“An accident? What happened?” Eiji’s head swam as he tried to remember the event, but nothing came to him. “How long has it been?”

“Nobody knows for sure. Your coach, Ibe - he was here before you woke up - says the pole may have slipped. You’ve been unconscious for almost three days. You took quite a fall.”

“Ibe. Ibe!” Relief coursed through Eiji as the name took a visual form inside his head. “Where is Ibe?” 

“He’s at work,” His father said. “He’ll be here. He’s been coming by every evening. He’s very worried about you - we all were.” 

“Where’s Ash, for that matter? Three days, you think he’d be by my sickbed by now.” He looked around to see that his mother and father were suddenly staring at the ground. “What?”

“Oh, honey.” His mother’s voice was impossibly gentle. “Ash isn’t here.” 

“I can see that!” He laughed in spite of himself. “Typical. He’s probably running around New York.”

“Try and get some sleep, Eiji. It’s nearly one in the morning.” His mother’s voice wavered as she spoke, as though she were on the brink of tears, but Eiji’s eyes were already closed. 

He woke to the doctor’s soothing voice rolling across the room. “The basic term is acute amnesia.”

“I don’t care about the basic term.” His mother's voice was quiet, laced with venom. “Just tell me what it means!”

“We think that depression, combined with the concussion, caused him to lose part of his memory.” His mother inhaled sharply but didn’t speak. “Oftentimes, the brain will force something traumatic into our subconscious in order to keep us safe. This is most likely what he’s done with the events of the past seven months.” 

“Well, can he get it back?” His father’s voice this time. Eiji was slowly gaining consciousness, the words dragging across his brain. He struggled to make sense of them. 

“Unclear. Sometimes, patients will get their memories back all at once, and sometimes they get reintroduced over a period of time.” The doctor paused. “But you cannot try and reintroduce them to him. His brain will decide when he’s ready.”

Eiji finally gained enough strength to open his eyes. Dr. Jones noticed him shift in his bed. “Eiji, Eiji! How are you?” 

“Okay.” He was fighting the urge to drift back into sleep. His head was hurting much less than yesterday, but all his muscles felt leaden. “Am I leaving today?”

The doctor chuckled. “Unfortunately not. We have some tasks we need to finish first.” 

Those tasks turned out to be basic physical therapy. Squeeze a stress ball. Twenty times for the right hand, twenty times for the left. Rotate his ankles. Twenty times clockwise, twenty times counterclockwise. Eiji scoffed at first, but the exercises left him exhausted. 

“Don’t be ashamed,” said Dr. Jones as Eiji sighed in defeat. “You’ve done remarkably well today.” 

“I know,” replied Eiji. “I just feel so weak.”

His parents had left. The doctor reassured them that now that Eiji was awake, there was no need for them to watch him constantly. And so they returned to work, and soon Eiji was alone again. The activity of the day had exhausted him, and soon his eyelids were growing heavy again, forcing him to succumb to sleep. 

When he awoke, the clock next to his bed read 4:32 PM. Dr. Jones was fiddling with one of the tubes in his arm, and most importantly, Ibe sat in a chair next to his bed. 

“Ibe!” Eiji sat up quickly, causing the doctor to shush him and continue writing on his clipboard. 

“Eiji! How are you doing?” 

“Better. A lot better.” He sighed. “I’m just tired.” 

“Would you want to go outside for a bit?” Ibe addressed him, then the doctor. “Is he allowed to go outside?”

“I don’t see why not,” replied Dr. Jones. 

So Ibe helped Eiji struggle into a wheelchair and wheeled him through the hospital as Eiji held onto his IV pole. They burst through the front doors, and Eiji smiled as the sunlight hit his face. 

“So how are you, really?” Ibe asked after they had found a spot underneath a tree. 

“I’m better. I am. I just wish Ash would get here.” He laughed. “I know it’s silly, but I feel like once I see him, everything will be better, you know? Like he’ll chase the concussion away or something.” 

Ibe looked at him forlornly. “What if he doesn’t come?”

“He will. I know he will.” Eiji’s heart swelled at the thought of seeing Ash. He hadn’t been able to hold him before, but this time he would. He’d make sure of it. 

The two sat in comfortable silence until Eiji began to feel drowsy, prompting him to ask Ibe to take him back inside. “I’m sorry. I hate being so goddamn tired. I think it’s these drugs they’re pumping into me.”

But Ibe simply laughed. “Well, you just focus on getting better, and then they won’t have to pump them into you anymore.”

Every day in the hospital was the same. He would wake up for breakfast and then physical therapy. Sometimes his parents would visit, and they would talk or play cards. Sometimes Ibe would visit and take him outside, and sometimes no one would visit at all. He was feeling more tired by the day and occasionally would fall asleep mid-conversation. When he was too fatigued to talk, he would just close his eyes and let his mind wander. He thought about his family, his friends, his time in America. But mostly he thought about Ash. 

“He taught me how to shoot a gun, you know,” he told his mother one time. She was knitting, and he lay on the bed, staring at the ceiling. “He gave me this tiny gun because he thought it would be easier, but I could never shoot it. So he let me shoot his. I was really bad at it, and I couldn’t hit anything, but he never got mad at me.” He closed his eyes and smiled at the memory. “Not even once. I can’t wait to see him.” 

“Eiji, you may need to consider the possibility that he’s not coming.” His mother sounded almost… _afraid._

“Of course he’s coming! He probably just has to wrap up some things first.” He glanced at his mother, who refused to look him in the eye. “Look, I know he sounds dangerous, but deep down he’s a sweetheart. You’ll like him. I promise.” 

A smile ghosted her lips but didn’t reach her eyes. “I’m sure I will.”

“I’m tired of being tired,” Eiji told the doctor. He had been promised a few days in the hospital, and it had been more than two weeks. “I can’t walk or pee on my own. I can’t even feed myself sometimes.” It was true - these days, Eiji’s hands shook so badly that sometimes one of the nurses had to feed him. “I want Ash to see me while I’m still coherent.” 

“Eiji, while you’re my patient, I promise I intend to keep you coherent for a long time. But are you sure that Ash will be seeing you?”

“Why does everyone keep _saying_ that?” Eiji ran a hand through his hair. “Of course he’s coming. You guys don’t know him like I do. The only way he wouldn’t come would be if the earth stopped turning. And maybe not even then.” 

“Okay, Eiji.” 

But weeks turned into a month, then a month and a half, and Ash still hadn’t come. Eiji was scared about the strength he was losing. It had become a challenge to sit up or lift his arms, let alone feed himself. Even talking was sometimes exhausting. Soon, it was difficult to move at all. Eiji was terrified that one day, he would wake up and find himself unable to open his eyes. Someone was always at his bedside now, be it his parents or Ibe. 

“I hope he still wants to visit me,” said Eiji to his mother one night. 

“Me too, honey.”

It was 2:54 in the morning. Eiji saw the clock, then Ibe, sitting in one of the hard plastic chairs, sound asleep. He turned his head and gasped. 

“Ash!” 

Ash leaned lazily against the wall, one hand in his pocket, looking as radiant as ever. He glanced up at the sound of his name and gave a smile, one with no trace of malice or hostility. It was all gentleness, the smile he reserved just for Eiji. 

Eiji forced himself to sit up, channeling all his energy into the movement. “Ash.”

At the sound of his voice, Ibe woke up. “What did you say?”

“Ash,” replied Eiji. “He’s here!” 

And then Ibe was crying, but why would he cry? Ash was here, and because Ash was here, everything would be okay. 

He turned back to the younger boy. “I knew you would come. Everyone kept telling me you wouldn’t. But I always knew.” 

Ash said nothing, just smiled and held out his hand. Eiji hesitated only a second before grabbing it. Warmth surged through his body. Ash pulled him out of bed, and for a moment Eiji worried that his legs wouldn’t be able to bear his own weight. But as his feet touched the floor, he realized he had never felt stronger. 

He held onto Ash’s hand as they walked out of the hospital room. 

“Thank you for being here. I was scared, for a minute, that I would never see you again.”

And as he had promised himself underneath the trees all those weeks ago, he swept Ash into his arms in the middle of the hospital corridor, holding him close. “I’m not letting you get away this time.”

Ash smiled again and finally spoke. “Are you ready to go?”

“I’ve always been ready,” replied Eiji. “I was just waiting for you.” 

Hand in hand, they walked out of the hospital doors.

**Author's Note:**

> Wow! Thank you so much for reading. This is the first piece I've written in a LONG time, so bear with me as I don't quite know the formalities of Archive Of Our Own yet. 
> 
> First and foremost, a HUGE thank you to AO3 user @akutagi for letting me use her prompt. I had so much fun writing this! If you're still with me, go check out some of her works - she's written for Haikyuu and BNHA!
> 
> Second, I haven't pole vaulted in three-odd years, so if I got any of the logistics wrong, please let me know! I tried to make everything as accurate as I could, but if anyone sees any errors feel free to point them out!
> 
> Third, I'm hoping to begin writing more! I can't make any promises, but if anyone has suggestions or ideas - anything at all - just shoot me a message and I'll try my best! (Can you message people on AO3? I have no idea.)
> 
> Stay healthy, stay safe, and thank you for reading!


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